Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday June 21, 2012 @07:08AM
from the volcano-base dept.

First time accepted submitter nrozema writes "Oracle co-founder and billionaire Larry Ellison is buying the Hawaiian island of Lana'i, the sixth-largest island in the U.S. archipelago. Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie confirmed in a written statement that the current landowner filed a transfer application with the state's Public Utilities commission Wednesday to sell its 98 percent share of the 141-square-mile island to Ellison."

No, about 2% of the island is owned by (if I recall correctly) descendents of Hawaiian natives.

The rest was owned by Dole for a long time, I was unaware it was no longer a pineapple plantation.

Interesting story: While the island was a pineapple plantation, it was nearly impossible to find fresh pineapple on the island in any restaurant or store. This was apparently because the natives were all sick of eating pineapple, and when they did want pineapple they would just sneak onto the plantation and steal one...

(My family went to Lanai when I was in middle school or high school, back when Dole owned most of it.)

Probably not. I imagine that like most states the state owns all natural bodies of water and x feet around them and such by law. It's supposed to justify fishing and pollution control policies or some such.

Buying a bare, windswept, island that has long ago been converted into a Pineapple plantation? The place is probably invested with rats....or soaked in pesticides. Seems like a waste of money to me. There isn't even a sandy beach.

no he thinks he is iron man hell he and oracle sponsored the movies. in avengers in the first couple minutes of the film you can see the oracle logo on the servers in the secret sheild base and there is a iron man and avengers section on the oracle site

You can't give him a tax cut, he already doesn't pay taxes. He doesn't exercise his options, because that would be a taxable event, he just borrows money against them, which isn't taxable income. But if you claim that the rich aren't on a level playing field, then you're engaging class warfare.

With something like this, he owns the land, not the island. That may sound stupid, but the island itself is part of Hawaii. For example - if the governor or legislature decides to build a highway across the island, they simply declare eminent domain and seize the land they need (paying for it at some "going rate"). However if he really owned the island, the government couldn't legally do that. So he is like any other landowner. The only difference is that he owns 98% of the land. All of the normal laws about land use still apply. If they have zoning there, it still applies. If they have laws like California does about maintaining free access to certain parts of beaches and waterways, those still apply. That's a far cry from what most people think of when they say someone owns an island. They generally think of it as the person being basically the sovereign there. And that is not true in this case. Larry isn't the king.

I'm not one of those idiots who whines and bitches about how someone makes more money than other people and how they should somehow give it all back to them or something. However, it's strange thinking that I've worked here for fifteen years and the biggest purchase of my life is my $200k house that I'll be paying off until I die . . . while my boss/CEO is buying fighter jets, billion dollar yachts, appearing in Iron Man 2, buying massively expensive houses all over the place, and buying a 141sq mile Hawaiian island. It's kind of demoralizing to realize that Larry probably spent more in this one purchase than every single person *combined* in my entire division will earn (after taxes) in three or four life-times. Or as much as I would earn in take-home if I continued working from today until the year 17,000.

The free market treats people the same way it treats commodities. Gold isn't just little bit more expensive than iron, it's *hugely* more expensive. Supply and demand apply just the same to people's salaries as they do to precious metals.

People can choose to accept that as a fundamental truth which we must accept (aka, libertarianism) or as something which it's fair to remedy (or must be remedied) by government action (aka, varying degrees of socialism blended with a market economy). It depends on wheth

The real difference between us and "them" is many of them are never satisfied with where they are in life and forever seek to improve upon it. Let alone except in very amazing cases the majority of these people spend the end of their life with the wealth. The internet revolution did spawn a lot of people with enough youth to enjoy their wealth longer.

See my tag, compare your achievements to your goals, never compare yourself to another. You can set a goal to have/do what they are doing

I'm not one of those idiots who whines and bitches about how someone makes more money than other people and how they should somehow give it all back to them or something. However, it's strange thinking that I've worked here for fifteen years and the biggest purchase of my life is my $200k house that I'll be paying off until I die . . . while my boss/CEO is buying fighter jets, billion dollar yachts, appearing in Iron Man 2, buying massively expensive houses all over the place, and buying a 141sq mile Hawaiian island. It's kind of demoralizing to realize that Larry probably spent more in this one purchase than every single person *combined* in my entire division will earn (after taxes) in three or four life-times. Or as much as I would earn in take-home if I continued working from today until the year 17,000.

I am one of those idiots. Not because we shouldn't award innovation and hard work, but because your boss/CEO is getting richer at your expense. I know that the libertarians around here like to say that free markets lead to meritocracy, but it just isn't the case. Your wages, my wages, and 99% of people on Slashdot have stagnated over the past 30 years. Instead, we are supposed to "earn" money by investing in a house. How has that worked out? Gen X, the generation to which I happen to belong, has lost around 40% of its wealth since the housing bubble burst. But Larry Ellison is buying a Hawaiian island. Where did that money come from? Thin air? Where did our lost wealth go? Thin air? No, of course not. It never existed except as debt on a bank balance sheet. And now that the debt has gone bad, we get to pay to de-leverage banks. The economy is zero sum. We can collectively only increase our wealth by the amount that the economy grows each year. Likewise, when the economy shrinks, we must collectively shed wealth. But somehow Larry gets rich when the economy grows and gets richer when it shrinks. That is the policies of the government actively transferring wealth from you and I to Larry Ellison so that he can buy a f***ing Hawaiian island during a prolonged, global economic contraction that has turned home ownership into Russian roulette for the rest of us. And it will continue like this until perception and reality [motherjones.com] converge.

Also, WTF does one person need with an entire Hawaiian island? Or a fighter jet? Why do we allow one person to accumulate so much wealth that they have to find new, unnecessary extravagances to blow it on while the rest of us can barely afford to educate our kids? Shouldn't there be some level of comfort that we allow the middle class to achieve before letting people like Larry Ellison skip ludicrous and go straight to plaid? Right now it seems that we have to wait for the benevolent "job creators" to toss some coin our way, but not until there is "more certainty" in the markets. Fortunately for us there are still enough billionaires to buy the White House for someone that understands their plight.

I see the Libertarian and Republican view of money as being analagous to Newtonian physics and relativity.

From the right PoV, money is a measure of hard work, perhaps talent; but no more. In every day life that makes sense. Money looks like a fair measure. Now, how much talent and hard work can you have? How much money can you have? By definition, nobody can have more than 100% of the money. That's like the speed of light. Just as in physics, non-Newtonian things start happening as you approach the speed of light.

The first sign that you have "relativistic money" is that you have un-earned income. For most of us this is a very small thing (interest, maybe some dividends). Faster, faster... you are going fast enough to live on your un-earned income. Faster still... you seek to protect your sources of income by currying favor with local politicians. Faster, FASTER. You seek national laws that work in your favor. FASTER, FASTER, RUN--for high office, or else enter the space-time continuum of those who hold high office. Attend $30k/plate dinners as a matter of routine. Effectively make policy, which feeds back into the hyperdrive of your ever accelerating fortunes.

Close to the monetary speed of light, the Newtonian world of talent and hard work are of minimal impact, whereas for most of us the relativistic impact of unearned income and influence are negligible, or just a dream.

Except it is a fixed size pie. The CEOs have a level of influence over how much the pie grows per year, but you can't seriously say that having an exceptional 10,000 person company with an average CEO is going to grow a company slower than an average 10,000 man company with an exceptional CEO. That leaves out that the CEO should continue to take a bigger portion of the growth of the pie every year until all of the growth is their share, which is exactly what's happening here.

Educate their women, which can only happen when they have enough to eat. Educated women on average have less children. They also wait until they have achieved other life goals to have children.

The food by itself only makes the situation worse. It bankrupts farmers and only serves to make more poor people. If the food was sourced as locally as possible and education was available and useful then the problem could be addressed.

Of course this is all based on the naive notion that the main purpose of food aid is to benefit those receiving the aid. That is merely a side effect, its real purpose is to consume market surpluses and enrich the producers of these commodities at the expense of future competition, the farmers that the aid puts out of work.

Humans unlike other animals stop breeding like rabbits once they have a comfortable living. For evidence look at the birth rates in first world nations.

Educate their women, which can only happen when they have enough to eat..

If it were only so simple. This has less to do with food and more to do with culture. For example, in Afganistan today, people have enough to eat, yet girls are being poisoned in the schools to prevent them from being educated.

In several places in africa today (darfur, kifu, central africa, niger, chad, sudan, yemen, etc) political power struggles are basically forcing massive numbers of people to migrate like refugees. In this situation, there's no farming, no education, no stability at all. Sometimes i

people in africa have been starving since i was a kid. too bad when you send them food the government takes it

We don't send food to Africa. We send them credits to buy food from America. The government there, sells the credits and uses the proceeds to fund their military and line their own pockets. If we actually gave them food, it would do more good as most of the underworld people who buy the credits are quite well fed.

We send rice directly to Haiti. All that did was destroy their rice farms. Meaning more poor people to go on food aid. We destroyed one of the larger parts of their economy with this aid.

Was that before or after all the natural disasters that hit Haiti? If it was post disasters, then it would be hard to claim that it was our aid and not the disasters that destroyed their agricultural economy. I'm seriously asking, not trying to be a smart*ss.

It is doubtful that either food or foreign aid helps these people. What they need is a functioning economy and a functioning society, and handouts create neither of them.

The way we could help them is remove subsidies from our agricultural products and remove trade barriers. But hell will freeze over before US and European farmers let that happen. It is politically much easier to first waste many billions on farm subsidies, then waste many more billions on "foreign aid".

I would agree with that. It's also important to keep in mind that the "family farm" is no more. Most of the billions in farm subsidies goes to large corporations. Today's farm subsidy program is just one more form of corporate welfare.

No criticism about the ridiculous wealth disparity in the world is appropriate if it comes from someone who spends significantly more than his share.

I wish I could mod this whole thread about share of wealth irrelevant. Whether Larry Ellison buys a huge chunk of real estate in Hawaii has nothing to do with whether a starving kid in Africa gets a meal today. And if Larry never got to the point where he could afford such a thing doesn't matter one iota to solve the plight of impoverished people around the world.

There are many fair criticisms about his management tactics and business decisions, but I fail to see how someone who has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to charity can be criticized for what appears to be yet another business deal.

The laws of the U.S. and Hawaii should ensure that he doesn't do anything harmful to the people or environment of this island. And if his involvement means the people that live there have a better life and he comes out ahead financially, then that's a net win we should all agree on.

Starving Africans are the first worlds responsibility how? They have nobody to blame but there own people. Local warlord take the food they grow "make" them grow other crops etc. They have a choice to stand up and possibly die. Nobody else can be responsible for them they are not children the sooner we stop treating them as such the better. As to starvation in particular that's a population control, there fertility rates are insane with most of Africa at 4 children per family and some nations close to

do it like the USA did with China. give them MFN status along with tax breaks for US companies to set up manufacturing and other low level operations there. its already happening in parts of africa

China was like africa not to long ago. except that i think a lot more people starved in china than in africa. tens of millions in the last century. you can thank clinton, foxconn and apple for giving them jobs outside a farm

Apple Foxconn and Clinton are actually late to the party on this one. They didn't move in until more boring infrastructure companies (power, water) set up shop.

Even before Nixon went to china the US was selling the chinese power generators through US companies that had non US subsidiaries. There was I think, a reasonable belief that the wedge between Russia/Soviet Union and China could be taken advantage of by friendly sales of non military things even before full on recognition of (Communist) Peoples Republic of China as the government rather than the Republic of China.

But yes, you're right. The solution to poverty in africa comes from trade. What's happened is that pure aid, in the form of food or money, has devastated economies, since someone from france will give away food why would you pay a local guy to grow any? Since the government gets half of its revenue from aid why would you pay taxes etc. Those two have combined to wreck chaos on economies (they aren't complete 100% effects). Trade isn't really possible until those countries can have credible education and legal systems (so investors won't lose all their money), and there will probably need to be some infrastructure investment.

There's still a need for aid for the moment, locusts, droughts that sort of thing, aren't going to be solved overnight. But in the long run Africa needs development from trade.

I don't want to defend the guy, but don't diss him over the way he spends his money. He gives well over $100 million/year to charity and is also one of the "Giving Pledge" signatories. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Pledge

We have no idea what he plans to do with this island but it may not be as we all expect. It might be part of some charity scheme. We'll just have to wait and see.

This is why I think the true answer is a blended system, where the basic necessities are available to everyone, but there is still incentive to go out and work for more than "the bare minimum". Pure capitalism has no mechanism within it to combat wealth inequality, whereas pure socialism has no mechanism to combat laziness and a lack of motivation, but mix the two, and you can eliminate the squalor that fosters crime and recidivism while still allowing people to move forward.

I never said I agreed with capitalism. I'm just tired of people crying about its obvious and direct consequences, and then say it's the bestest system of them all because it promotes competition and excellence.

it's the bestest system of them all because it promotes competition and excellence

Most compititions generally have a loser... Capitilism may not be perfect, but it's the best socioeconomic system we've got. Anyone complaining about it can go ahead and invent a new one. Socialism (under any name) isn't it.

The title reads like it is a little misleading to me... The way I read it was in the context that he bought an island he already owned (which would not surprise me). I don't know why the/. editor who posted this thought it wouldn't be interpreted this way though... (or why I'm the first to comment on it?)

Surely: "Larry Ellison buys Hawaiian Island" would have sufficed?

While I might not have studied journalism, I did have a job as a journalist for about a year (as well as being made editor of some smaller

It's bad grammar to be sure, but is a common speech construct (in the US). Some people might say "I bought my own car" or "I bought my own house". The meaning is that they bought it for themselves, as opposed to "I bought my mom a house". So the title is basically saying he bought the island for his own use, as opposed to buying it for someone else, for the company, etc.

"Good news! I have just sold one of our islands for half the proceeds from Oracle's upcoming multi-billion-dollar lawsuit against Google! Even if they get only half what they're asking, we will make a killing. I promise a hula hoop around every midriff!"

Why is it that I feel a lot better about Richard Branson buying an island or David Copperfield buying an island than I do this jackass? When PeopleSoft was still an independent company I used to work there. Best job I ever had. Then Ellison decides to buy it and the whole culture changes. People, including me, are leaving in droves. Couldn't work there. Wouldn't work there. Ellison is the biggest douchbag on the face of the earth.

the idea of a single person owning the island of Lana'i is crass in the extreme.

Why? Its just an extreme instance of private property rights. So at what point do you say that this much property is enough but any more is not right? 141 square miles is big, but its not the largest private land parcel by a long shot.

Now, if you want to raise the issue of how the original land owner, Castle and Cooke, came to possess this island, that's another (interesting) issue.

animals "own" land as well. predators have their own personal hunting territories they will fight for. vegetarians will fight for the best spots. the biggest deer, moose, elk or whatever will push/beat a weaker member of the tribe from any spot he wants to eat at

I have to disagree. A lion eating you because you infringed on his territory is remarkably similar to me shooting you for trespassing. We both mark our territorial boundaries and we both defend them. We can also both lose our territory if we fail to defend it.

I have to disagree. A lion eating you because you infringed on his territory is remarkably similar to me shooting you for trespassing. We both mark our territorial boundaries and we both defend them. We can also both lose our territory if we fail to defend it.

Not true. A lion will eat what it kills, so the purpose is to provide food. The territory protection is secondary. So, unless you are going to eat the trespasser you shot they are not the same at all. Besides, human beings supposedly have the ability to use reason, where as animals rely on instinct. In other words, we have a choice for what we do or how we act. The lion can only act like a lion.

I'm not sure about lions, but wolves will kill coyotes that infringe on their territory, but they will not eat them. Coyotes will kill foxes that also compete for the same food source, and generally the coyotes will not eat the foxes. Killing your prey and killing your non-prey competitors are both common in the animal world. Animals, even predators, do not always eat everything they kill.

I think you hit the nail on the head. Most of us who have posted negatively is because of what seems to be a very self-focused decision. I think there are many of us who want to help feed the hungry, house the homeless, and cure the ill, but we also have challenges of our own, children to raise, and even have fears for providing for our own retirement. You cannot help others if you cannot even help yourself. That said, many of us give to charities, tip waitstaff generously, lend tools to neighbors we ba